Note 1. III. Edmund Spenser.He was born in East Smithfield about the year 1553. In 1569 he was admitted as a sizar of Pembroke Hall in the University of Cambridge, and he attained the degree of Master of Arts in 1576. In after life he became secretary to Arthur Lord Gray of Wilton, lord deputy of Ireland, who appears to have been his firm and bountiful patron; for the poet terms him the pillar of his life. The chief occupation of Spensers life, however, was literature, to which he was ardently attached to the day of his death, January 16, 15989. The chief work of Spenser is his Faerie Queen, the object of which is to represent all the moral virtues, assigning to every virtue a knight, to be the patron and defender of the same; in whose actions the feats of arms and chivalry, the operations of that virtue whereof he is the protector, are to be expressed, and the vices and unruly appetites that oppose themselves against the same are to be beaten down and overcome. The Faerie Queen scarcely admits of extract, and Spenser is introduced into this work chiefly as the author of two beautiful hymns on Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beauty. But the claims of Spenser to the title of Sacred Poet may be estimated as much by the titles of poetical treasures lost, as by those we possess. He wrote paraphrases of Ecclesiastes, and of the Canticum Canticorum; the Hours of our Lord, the Sacrifice of a Sinner, and the Seven Penitential Psalms, which are irretrievably lost to posterity. See his Complete Poetical Works. [back]